The air pollution problems associated with such combustion by-products as, for example, the various oxides of nitrogen, sulfur, carbon, phosphorus, mercury and other metals, the various halides such as HCl and HBr, the phosphoryl compounds, the many other volatile metal halides, oxides and complexes, the various sulfur containing compounds such as hydrogen sulfide or carbon disulfide, and the organic toxic pollutants such as dioxin and the like which are strongly adsorbed on fly ash, are well recognized and of course, are the subject of enormous international research and development effort. Such by-products typically are produced through garbage or trash incineration, or building heating, power production or the like from fossil or other fuels.
Industry has responded to these problems with many pollution control devices and processes such as off-gas scrubbing, filtering, electrical precipitation, electric arc afterburning, catalytic burning, baffled flues and chimneys, and the like, many of which are of limited practical valve, particularly for the effective removal of fly ash and other particulate fines, and practically all of which require large and expensive special auxilliary off-gas handling equipment and housing structures therefor. Ofttimes these control devices are not adaptable to existing flue equipment and the cooperating or supporting equipment or installations comprises several buildings or at least several interconnected but separate installations of scrubbers, cyclone separators, filter equipment, economizers, and the like, which necessarily complicate the off-gas treatment aspect, both labor and apparatus, particularly maintenance, and leads to unmanageable cost of off-gas clean up. Typical such prior installations are depicted and discussed in the Allen Hershkowitz article in Technology Review, July 30, 1987, and in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,710,555; 3,706,182; 3,695,004; 3,984,220; 4,095,514; 4,286,973; 4,206,722; 4,635,569; and 3,442,232, the disclosures of all of which are incorporated herein by reference, particularly the relevant structures thereof, e.g., the spray or jet nozzles.
Objects of the present invention therefore, are:
(1) to provide an off-gas treatment process and apparatus therefor which is useable as original equipment or readily adaptable to existing flue structures at minimum reconstruction effort and cost, and which is highly effective in reducing the levels of undesirable air pollutants, especially particulate fines;
(2) to provide such process and apparatus which is provided with scrubbing means adaptable to automatic, electronic control;
(3) to provide such process and apparatus with continous or semi-continuous off-gas monitoring analysis, computer interpretation of the analysis data and computer regulation of chemical reactor means within the flue system for reacting out normally pollutant chemicals in response to said computer interpretation; and
(4) to provide such method and process which is energy efficient and capable of effectively generating power, particularly electric power.